Dyer: Deadly game continues as Turkey invades Syria

There are comical elements in the Turkish invasion of northern Syria. Its name, for example: Operation Olive Branch. Or the back-pedalling by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson about the announcement that triggered the Turkish offensive.

A week ago the U.S. declared it was building a 30,000-strong “border security force” in the territory controlled by the Syrian Kurds along the Turkish border. It would be backed by 2,000 U.S. troops, who would remain there indefinitely. Whereupon Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan exploded, and declared his army would strangle this Kurdish “terror army” in its cradle.

Tillerson quickly denied it all. “That entire situation has been misportrayed, misdescribed, some people misspoke. We are not creating a border security force at all,” Tillerson said.

In any case, the Turkish army is now fighting its way into the Kurdish-controlled Afrin enclave, with further operations promised to eliminate the rest of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that the United States used to destroy Islamic State’s troops in eastern Syria. From Erdogan’s point of view, all Kurds are bad Kurds.

And Washington is betraying and abandoning its Kurdish allies. They were useful at the time, but it’s more important to keep Turkey happy. It’s the most powerful country in the Middle East, it’s a NATO ally (with the second-biggest army in the alliance), and it controls the Straits that give the Russian navy access to the Mediterranean. So the United States confines itself to urging “restraint” on the Turks.

That’s what great powers say when they have no intention of intervening to stop something bad — and the Russians are also urging restraint. The ally the Russians are betraying is the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

“We warn the Turkish leaders that if they start fighting in the region of Afrin, it will be seen as an aggression by the Turkish army against the sovereignty of Syria,” said Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad last week. But then Turkish military and intelligence chiefs flew to Moscow on Thursday and got Russian and Iranian approval for their bombing campaign.

The Damascus regime hates Turkish tanks on its soil, but it accepts Moscow’s hands-off policy because it depends on Russian and Iranian military support for its comeback in the Syrian civil war. It too suspects America was planning to create a Kurdish-ruled protectorate in the northeastern part of Syria as a U.S. base and counterweight to the Russian presence.

Why has Russia given the green light for the Turkish invasion? Because President Vladimir Putin senses an opportunity to pry Turkey out of NATO and make it a Russian ally. Turkey has just bought $2.5 billion of Russian arms so he has some reason to hope. And he suspects the U.S. was planning to use the Kurds to maintain a foothold in Syria.

The Syrian Kurds are also lying. They insist their army, the People’s Protection Units (YFP), has no links with the PKK, the nationalist and sometimes separatist movement of the Turkish Kurds, which is listed as a terrorist organization by NATO, the U.S. and the European Union. But of course they have links.

Business as usual, in other words.

This is an old game, so old the rulers of the first Sumerian city-states would recognize it.

A few thousand people get killed, a few pawns move on the strategic chessboard, and then it’s time for the next round. Once in a while things get out of hand and a great deal of death and destruction ensues, but not often: maybe every second generation. And there is no final outcome: the leading players change from time to time, but the game never ends.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.